James Prescott Joule

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James Prescott Joule
FRSE
Born(1818-12-24)24 December 1818
Salford, Lancashire, England
Died11 October 1889(1889-10-11) (aged 70)
Sale, Cheshire, England
CitizenshipBritish
Known for
Spouse
Amelia Grimes
​
​
(m. 1847; died 1854)​
Children
  • Benjamin Arthur
  • Alice Amelia
  • Henry
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
Hunterian Museum
, Glasgow.
Articles about
Electromagnetism
Solenoid
Electrostatics
Magnetostatics
Electrodynamics
Electrical network
Magnetic circuit
Covariant formulation
Scientists

James Prescott Joule

law of conservation of energy, which in turn led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived unit of energy, the joule
, is named after him.

He worked with

Joule's first law
. His experiments about energy transformations were first published in 1843.

Early years

James Joule was born in 1818, the son of Benjamin Joule (1784–1858), a wealthy

brewer, and his wife, Alice Prescott, on New Bailey Street in Salford.[3] Joule was tutored as a young man by the famous scientist John Dalton and was strongly influenced by chemist William Henry and Manchester engineers Peter Ewart and Eaton Hodgkinson. He was fascinated by electricity, and he and his brother experimented by giving electric shocks to each other and to the family's servants.[4]

As an adult, Joule managed the brewery. Science was merely a serious hobby. Sometime around 1840, he started to investigate the feasibility of replacing the brewery's

scientific papers on the subject were contributed to William Sturgeon's Annals of Electricity. Joule was a member of the London Electrical Society, established by Sturgeon and others.[citation needed
]

Motivated in part by a businessman's desire to quantify the economics of the choice, and in part by his scientific inquisitiveness, he set out to determine which prime mover was more efficient. He discovered

battery. Joule captured the output of the alternative methods in terms of a common standard, the ability to raise a mass weighing one pound to a height of one foot, the foot-pound.[citation needed
]

However, Joule's interest diverted from the narrow financial question to that of how much work could be extracted from a given source, leading him to speculate about the convertibility of energy. In 1843 he published results of experiments showing that the heating effect he had quantified in 1841 was due to generation of heat in the

Peltier–Seebeck effect to claim that heat and current were convertible in an, at least approximately, reversible process.[citation needed
]

The mechanical equivalent of heat

Further experiments and measurements with his electric motor led Joule to estimate the

British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cork in August 1843 and was met by silence.[7]

Joule was undaunted and started to seek a purely mechanical demonstration of the conversion of work into heat. By forcing water through a perforated cylinder, he could measure the slight

significant digits
was, to Joule, compelling evidence of the reality of the convertibility of work into heat.

Wherever mechanical force is expended, an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained.

— J.P. Joule, August, 1843

Joule now tried a third route. He measured the heat generated against the work done in compressing a gas. He obtained a mechanical equivalent of 798 foot-pounds force per British thermal unit (4,290 J/Cal). In many ways, this experiment offered the easiest target for Joule's critics but Joule disposed of the anticipated objections by clever experimentation. Joule read his paper to the Royal Society on 20 June 1844,[8][9] but his paper was rejected for publication by the Royal Society and he had to be content with publishing in the Philosophical Magazine in 1845.[10] In the paper he was forthright in his rejection of the caloric reasoning of Carnot and Émile Clapeyron, a rejection partly theologically driven:[citation needed]

I conceive that this theory ... is opposed to the recognised principles of philosophy because it leads to the conclusion that vis viva may be destroyed by an improper disposition of the apparatus: Thus Mr Clapeyron draws the inference that 'the temperature of the fire being 1000 °C to 2000 °C higher than that of the boiler there is an enormous loss of vis viva in the passage of the heat from the furnace to the boiler.' Believing that the power to destroy belongs to the Creator alone I affirm ... that any theory which, when carried out, demands the annihilation of force, is necessarily erroneous.

Joule here adopts the language of vis viva (energy), possibly because Hodgkinson had read a review of Ewart's On the measure of moving force to the Literary and Philosophical Society in April 1844.[citation needed]

Joule wrote in his 1844 paper:[citation needed]

... the mechanical power exerted in turning a magneto-electric machine is converted into the heat evolved by the passage of the currents of induction through its coils; and, on the other hand, that the motive power of the electromagnetic engine is obtained at the expense of the heat due to the chemical reactions of the battery by which it is worked.

In June 1845, Joule read his paper On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat to the British Association meeting in Cambridge.[11] In this work, he reported his best-known experiment, involving the use of a falling weight, in which gravity does the mechanical work, to spin a paddle wheel in an insulated barrel of water which increased the temperature. He now estimated a mechanical equivalent of 819 foot-pounds force per British thermal unit (4,404 J/Cal). He wrote a letter to the Philosophical Magazine, published in September 1845 describing his experiment.[12]

Joule's Heat Apparatus, 1845

In 1850, Joule published a refined measurement of 772.692 foot-pounds force per British thermal unit (4,150 J/Cal), closer to twentieth century estimates.[13]

Reception and priority

For the controversy over priority with Mayer, see Mechanical equivalent of heat § Priority.
Joule's apparatus for measuring the mechanical equivalent of heat

Much of the initial resistance to Joule's work stemmed from its dependence upon extremely

scientific instrument-maker John Benjamin Dancer. Joule's experiments complemented the theoretical work of Rudolf Clausius, who is considered by some to be the coinventor of the energy concept.[citation needed
]

Joule was proposing a kinetic theory of heat (he believed it to be a form of rotational, rather than translational, kinetic energy), and this required a conceptual leap: if heat was a form of molecular motion, why did the motion of the molecules not gradually die out? Joule's ideas required one to believe that the collisions of molecules were perfectly elastic. Importantly, the very existence of atoms and molecules was not widely accepted for another 50 years.[citation needed]

Although it may be hard today to understand the allure of the

Lord Kelvin that Carnot's mathematics were equally valid without assuming a caloric fluid.[citation needed
]

However, in Germany,

Julius Robert von Mayer. Though both men had been neglected since their respective publications, Helmholtz's definitive 1847 declaration of the conservation of energy credited them both.[citation needed
]

Also in 1847, another of Joule's presentations at the British Association in

William Thomson, later to become Lord Kelvin, who had just been appointed professor of natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Stokes was "inclined to be a Joulite" and Faraday was "much struck with it" though he harboured doubts. Thomson was intrigued but sceptical.[citation needed
]

Unanticipated, Thomson and Joule met later that year in

Cascade de Sallanches waterfall, though this subsequently proved impractical.[citation needed
]

Though Thomson felt that Joule's results demanded theoretical explanation, he retreated into a spirited defence of the

absolute temperature, Thomson wrote that "the conversion of heat (or caloric) into mechanical effect is probably impossible, certainly undiscovered"[15][16] – but a footnote signalled his first doubts about the caloric theory, referring to Joule's "very remarkable discoveries". Surprisingly, Thomson did not send Joule a copy of his paper but when Joule eventually read it he wrote to Thomson on 6 October, claiming that his studies had demonstrated conversion of heat into work but that he was planning further experiments. Thomson replied on the 27th, revealing that he was planning his own experiments and hoping for a reconciliation of their two views. Though Thomson conducted no new experiments, over the next two years he became increasingly dissatisfied with Carnot's theory and convinced of Joule's. In his 1851 paper, Thomson was willing to go no further than a compromise and declared "the whole theory of the motive power of heat is founded on two propositions, due respectively to Joule, and to Carnot and Clausius".[citation needed
]

As soon as Joule read the paper he wrote to Thomson with his comments and questions. Thus began a fruitful, though largely epistolary, collaboration between the two men, Joule conducting experiments, Thomson analysing the results and suggesting further experiments. The collaboration lasted from 1852 to 1856, its discoveries including the Joule–Thomson effect, and the published results did much to bring about general acceptance of Joule's work and the kinetic theory.[citation needed]

Kinetic theory

James Prescott Joule

Kinetics is the science of motion. Joule was a pupil of Dalton and it is no surprise that he had learned a firm belief in the

atomic theory, even though there were many scientists of his time who were still skeptical. He had also been one of the few people receptive to the neglected work of John Herapath on the kinetic theory of gases. He was further profoundly influenced by Peter Ewart's 1813 paper "On the measure of moving force".[citation needed
]

Joule perceived the relationship between his discoveries and the kinetic theory of heat. His laboratory notebooks reveal that he believed heat to be a form of rotational, rather than translational motion.[citation needed]

Joule could not resist finding antecedents of his views in Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) and Sir Humphry Davy. Though such views are justified, Joule went on to estimate a value for the mechanical equivalent of heat of 1,034 foot-pound from Rumford's publications. Some modern writers have criticised this approach on the grounds that Rumford's experiments in no way represented systematic quantitative measurements. In one of his personal notes, Joule contends that Mayer's measurement was no more accurate than Rumford's, perhaps in the hope that Mayer had not anticipated his own work.[citation needed]

Joule has been attributed with explaining the sunset green flash phenomenon in a letter to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1869; actually, he merely noted (with a sketch) the last glimpse as bluish green, without attempting to explain the cause of the phenomenon.[17]

Published work

  • Volumes I and II of "The Scientific Papers"
    Volumes I and II of "The Scientific Papers"
  • Title page of volume I of "The Scientific Papers"
    Title page of volume I of "The Scientific Papers"
  • Preface to volume I of "The Scientific Papers"
    Preface to volume I of "The Scientific Papers"
  • Figure from volume I of "The Scientific Papers"
    Figure from volume I of "The Scientific Papers"

Honours

A statue of Joule in the Manchester Town Hall
Brooklands cemetery, Sale

Joule died at home in

foot-pounds of work must be expended at sea level to raise the temperature of one pound of water from 60 °F to 61 °F. There is also a quotation from the Gospel of John: "I must work the work of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work".[19] The Wetherspoon's pub in Sale
, the town of his death, is named "The J. P. Joule" after him.

Joule's many honours and commendations include:

There is a memorial to Joule in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey,[21] though he is not buried there, contrary to what some biographies state. A statue of Joule by Alfred Gilbert stands in Manchester Town Hall, opposite that of Dalton.

Family

Joule married Amelia Grimes in 1847. She died in 1854, seven years after their wedding. They had three children together: a son, Benjamin Arthur Joule (1850–1922), a daughter, Alice Amelia (1852–1899), and a second son, Joe (born 1854, died three weeks later).

See also

References

Footnotes

  1. OED: "Although some people of this name call themselves .(dʒaʊl), and others (dʒəʊl) [the OED format for /dʒoʊl/
    ], it is almost certain that J. P. Joule (and at least some of his relatives) used (dʒuːl)."
  2. ^ Joule's unit of 1 ft lbf/Btu corresponds to 5.3803×10−3 J/cal. Thus Joule's estimate was 4.15 J/cal, compared to the value accepted by the beginning of the 20th century of 4.1860 J/cal[6]

Citations

  1. ^ Murray 1901, p. 606.
  2. ^ Allen 1943, p. 354.
  3. ^ Biographical Index 2006.
  4. ^ "This Month Physics History: December 1840: Joule's abstract on converting mechanical power into heat".
  5. ^ Joule 1841, p. 260.
  6. ^ Zemansky 1968, p. 86.
  7. ^ Joule 1843, pp. 263, 347 & 435.
  8. ^ Joule 1844.
  9. ^ Joule 1884, p. 171.
  10. ^ Joule 1845, pp. 369–383.
  11. ^ Joule 1845b, p. 31.
  12. ^ Joule 1845c, pp. 205–207.
  13. ^ Joule 1850, pp. 61–82.
  14. ^ Sibum 1995.
  15. ^ Thomson 1848.
  16. ^ Thomson 1882, pp. 100–106.
  17. ^ Joule 1884, p. 606.
  18. ^ GRO Register of Deaths: DEC 1889 8a 121 ALTRINCHAM – James Prescott Joule
  19. ^ John 9:4
  20. ^ Cameron, Stuart D (n.d.). "Honorary Members and Fellows". Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. Retrieved 17 September 2019.
  21. ^ Hall 1966, p. 62.

Sources

Further reading

External links

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